Monthly Archives: June 2009

So, this is something I’ve been periodically doing. I look at Blog Azeroth, and I find fairly decent quality druid bloggers to introduce to my readers. Although there’s only rolling restarts today, I figure you’ll still need some reading material for the downtime on a handful of servers that are going to be down longer. I’m also going to be on an airplane during maintenance today (what? I plan everything around maintenance days!). I’ll still be posting while I’m on my trip. There’s too many exciting things going on, with the PTR for 3.2 ready to start up any day… so I’m blaming my summer teaching job and bringing my laptop with me!

So, here are the gems that I found today in my search.

First up, Boize of the Moonglade blog. Boize is from New Zealand and has a brand new druid blog! There aren’t many posts up yet. However, there is some pretty interesting posts about things like casual versus hardcore players.

Another new druid blog is Tranquility druid by Spexie. This is a resto druid blog, with a focus on raiding. Posts include information about haste rating, being prepared for raids, and other posts that you should read.

Last, but not least, is Wild Growth by Tazha. Tazha’s blog has posts about raiding, adventure, achievements and more!

To the new bloggers: welcome to the druid blogging community! (also, I’m going by dates they posted intros at Blog Azeroth, so if you’ve been around longer than I thought, I apologize).

Okay, so I sat down yesterday to try and crank out the majority of the festival things. I left a couple to finish today (like getting into Orgrimmar because it was just too crowded yesterday).

So, after a stealth run into Orgrimmar, and a couple other fast things today, I have already finished the Fire Festival achievement! So, I now have the title “Flame Warden” Lissanna. And.. I have the whole rest of the event to relax and either do stuff or not, because I have the meta achievement part done, so I don’t have to stress about it.

Getting the fire from Orgrimar was moderately difficult, but I had managed to sneak in without anyone noticing, climbed ontop of the ledge, got closer, and then dive-bombed the flame in stealth mode before they even saw me. Then, I dashed off, shadowmelded away from the flame, went kitty-stealth again, then hearthed out behind a pole somewhere they couldn’t see me.

Here’s the ledge:

And my Horde friends, getting into Ironforge and Stormwind is not going to be easy… Good luck!

Since I spent all my time the last 24 hours or so working on these achievements, I really don’t have anything much more substantial to say…

This is one holiday that I usually ignore. The middle of my summers are usually pretty busy. However, with the achievement system, I want to try and get them all done to be able to get the holiday meta-achievement at some point in the future.

So, lets take a look at the dangerously HOT summer festival. Make sure you don’t spend too much time around the fire, or you might get burnt.

Okay, burning tree jokes aside, this achievement set is nothing to laugh about.

It requires going to a LOT of places, gathering a lot of items, and even going into cities of the opposite factions and getting flagged for PvP in the process.

Highlights include: Burning Hot Pole Dance, where you light yourself on fire and then dance. (just kidding, but not really).

The meta achievement for this one is The Flame Keeper, with the title “flame keeper” as the reward. I mean, it just seems funny to have a tree with “flame keeper” written over their head. I like the humor of it all.

Are you guys working towards this summer achievement holiday? Or, are you too busy or just don’t care about the holiday? I’m pretty busy this time of the year (with my sister getting married next weekend), but I’m going to do my best to complete the achievements during what little playtime I have over the next couple weeks. It gives me an interesting goal to work on in-game.

Okay, so as long as I can remember playing a druid (which is a long time), innervate has been on a 6 minute cooldown, and it restored a big chunk of mana. So, if you knew it was going to be longer than a 6 minute fight, you had to decide whether to try and innervate early, in hopes of it being up again, or you just innervated once at the mid-way point, or whenever it was that you got dangerously low on mana from healing. If it was going to be less than a 6 minute fight, you just used it whenever you (or someone around you) was low on mana, whenever that happened to be, without any regard for having to use it again. And, since it restored 3/4ths of your mana pool,

Now, on a 3 minute cooldown (in 3.2), restoring half the amount of mana, we need to use it earlier, so that it will be back up before the fight ends. It also means that since it restores half the amount of mana, we’ll also need to use it more often. So, you’d have to hit it early in the fight, and then hit it again once it’s off cooldown 3 minutes later. If it’s a long fight, you may even be able to squeeze in a 3rd. In a 5 minute fight, you could use it at min. 1 & 4, and not really gain any more mana than you had before. But, it also means you have to time your innervate, since using it at minute 3 of a 5 minute fight means you only get to use it once. So, it’s really not that much of a PvE buff, given the normal length of boss fights. In a 10 minute fight, you would get to use it 3 times if you timed all the innervates right. Keep in mind that even as a resto druid, you don’t have to use it on yourself – now that even paladin healers are complaining about possible mana problems, and replenishment got nerfed, our mini-innervates are going to go a long way (maybe).

This means that feral druids can cast it on people multiple times in the fight if casters start having mana problems. Moonkin can use it on themselves or on other people, and in most fights, they can use it on more than 1 person if they want. So, in conclusion, we’re going to need to time our innervate useage, so that we can maximize the mana gains. I’m pretty sure other classes are having to time their abilities that are on shorter coldowns, so I don’t think it will be that hard of a switch.